Portraits of Washington
“Though a better likeness of him were shown to us, we should reject it; for the only idea that we now have of George Washington is associated with Stuart’s Washington.”
— John Neal, 19th-century writer and art critic
Gilbert Stuart was 20 years old when he left Newport, R.I., for England in 1775. Though Stuart professed himself a patriot, the revolution had disrupted American society and dried up his prospects as a portraitist. Not long after he arrived in London he attached himself to Benjamin West, an American-born artist who had became George III’s favorite painter, who helped convince His Royal Majesty to establish the Royal Academy of Arts.
West was obviously a loyalist, so Stuart kept his mouth shut and painted background draperies while he learned his master’s techniques and methods and sweet-talked some of his prospective clients into taking a chance on a younger, cheaper artist. Within a couple of years Stuart was having his portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy and racking up his own commissions.
But like a lot of young men, he was not careful financially. Depending on which source you consult, he was either thrown into debtors’ prison or narrowly avoided it. He moved—or fled—to Ireland in 1787 where he continued to paint society types and accumulate debt. At some point he hit on a plan for financial solvency. He would become the definitive painter of George Washington.
When he left Dublin for America in 1793, he is said to have told a friend he intended “to make a fortune by Washington.”
This took no small amount of chutzpah. John Trumbull, who served as an aide-decamp to Washington during the early days of the revolution, was established as the pre-eminent painter of the time. (His father, Jonathan Trumbull, a prosperous merchant who served as governor of Connecticut, had been the only colonial governor to support the revolutionary cause.) By 1780, he had produced a painting of General Washington in uniform.
After Trumbull resigned his commission and went to England to study under West, Stuart was assigned to mentor him. Within weeks Trumbull was arrested for treason and thrown into prison, where he would spend the duration of the war. After the Americans captured and hanged British Major John Andre as a spy, there was some talk of hanging Trumbull in retribution. (Trumbull may have acted as a spy for the U.S. government; some believe he conveyed secret information to Benjamin Franklin, then serving as the American minister in Paris.)
As a gentleman, Trumbull was allowed visitors and the run of the gardens at Bridewell Prison, and he continued to work with West and Stuart, with whom he became close friends. When hostilities ended, Trumbull was given a 400-pound fine and sent on his way. Soon he was busy painting battle scenes from the revolution as well as commissioned portraits. He became close friends with Franklin’s successor Thomas Jefferson, who suggested he depict the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a project that would take him 23 years to finish. (It’s the one you’re thinking of, as iconic as it is inaccurate.)
Trumbull returned to the U.S. in 1789, maybe because paintings of British defeats didn’t endear him to the English. His business plan was to find 500 subscribers willing to pay $200 apiece for a set of 13 engravings of his of war paintings. (The American public was not much interested.)
He knocked off another painting of Washington from memory in 1790—“Washington at Verplanck’s Point”—but otherwise found it hard to make it as a painter in the former colonies. He ended up taking a day job as secretary to chief justice of the United States John Jay in 1794.
If Trumbull couldn’t make by his oils alone, what hope had Stuart?
That same year in late autumn, Stuart traveled to Philadelphia to ask Washington to sit for a portrait. Chief Justice Jay had supplied him with a letter of introduction. The country needed images of its glorious leader. So in 1795, the president grudgingly sat for Stuart.
It didn’t go well. To break the ice, the artist allegedly told Washington that in order for the portrait to be successful, “you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter,” to which the president responded, “Mr. Stuart need never feel the need for forgetting who he is and who General Washington is.”
Despite a frosty, uncomfortable relationship, Stuart painted Washington twice more, and later churned out hundreds of copies. Scholars group these painting in to three types, referring to their original owners. The first painting, known today as the Vaughan portrait, shows Washington from the waist up, positioned in three-quarter profile against a sweeping curtain that symbolizes state authority.
The image on the dollar bill descends from the unfinished Athenaeum portrait from 1796, which was originally acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was begun in 1796 at the behest of Martha Washington, to whom the painter promised the portrait. But after Stuart painted the president’s face, he decided not to finish the portrait but to keep it as a reference for 50 or so future paintings.
Finally Stuart painted a full-length Lansdowne portrait which was given to the Marquis of Lansdowne, the former British prime minister. Only Washington’s head is painted from life; a stand-in was engaged for the rest. Here Stuart unironically employs the “Grand Manner” style he learned from West, with the portrait evoking Hyacinthe Rigaud’s 1701 portrait of Louis XIV.
Stuart loads on the allegorical baggage, with a rainbow symbolizing peace and prosperity after the storm of the revolution in the upper right and allusions to the Roman Republic resonant with the popular view of Washington as a new Cincinnatus, the warrior who laid down his arms rather than taking power.
Some of Washington’s relatives thought Stuart failed to capture the essence of Washington, who by the time he assumed the presidency was far past his peak. His hearing, eyesight and memory were failing. His sense of humor had never been that healthy.
Still, he is the Ur-American, a self-constructed, rugged stoic with a well-documented lust for land and social standing. Had he ever secured the royal commission he sought again and again during the French and Indian War, we might all be British subjects. He could have installed himself as emperor and did not. Who knows why? Who knows Washington?